Cheryl Strayed Quotes

I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.

In spite of the complexity of your situation, it's notable that you didn't waver when it came to what you know to be the right thing to do. That's because you know the right thing to do. So do it. It's hard, I know. It's one of the hardest things you'll ever have to do. And you're going to bawl your head off doing it. But I promise you it will be okay. Your tears will be born of grief, but also of relief. You will be better for them. They will make you harder, softer, cleaner, dirtier. Free.
A glorious something else awaits.

Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night.

Write so blazingly good that you can't be framed... Write like a motherfucker.

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves...

Your light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you're doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are.

It’s a lie you’ve told yourself that has flattened down whatever hurts.

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

The whole deal about loving truly and for real and with all you've got has everything to do with letting those we love see what made us.

You did things you didn't hope to do. You have not always been your best self. This means that you're like the rest of us.

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves,

Forgiveness bellows from the bottom of the canoe. There are doubts, dangers, unfathomable travesties. There are stories you’ll learn if you’re strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.